John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

As I quietened, I was glad that I’d torn up the unopened letter in the train that I was supposed to have given to Moran. I felt a new life had already started to grow out of the ashes, out of the stupidity of human wishes.

‘If Jocko comes today I’ll warm his arse for this once.’ Murphy laughed fiercely. The hair on the powerful arms that held the sledge was smeared to the skin with a paste of dust and oil. The small blue eyes twinkled in the leather of the face as they searched for the effect of what he’d said. There was always the tension he might break loose from behind the mixer with the sledge, or, if he didn’t, that someone else would, with shovel or with sledge.

‘A disgrace, worse than an animal,’ Keegan echoed. He wore a brown hat that stank with sweat and dust over his bald head. Keegan was very proud he had a second cousin who was a schoolmaster in Mohill.

‘I want to be at no coroner’s inquest on his head,’ Murphy said, and started to beat the back of the steel hopper out of boredom as the engine idled over.

Jocko came every day, crazed on meths and rough cider, and usually made straight for the pool of shade and water under the mixer.

‘He’d be just a ham sandwich if you brought down the hopper with him lying there and we’d all be in the fukken soup,’ Murphy continued.

‘Likes of him coming on the site anyhow would give it a bad name in no time,’ Keegan tiraded, while Galway rested on his shovel, watching the breasts of the machinists lean above their sewing in the third-floor windows of Rose and Margols, gown manufacturers on Christian Street. Galway was youngest of us all. I’d worked the whole of the hot summer with Galway and Keegan behind the mixer Murphy drove like some royal ape, and in the last two weeks Jocko had come every day. The mixer idled away. On the roof they were changing the bays.

‘Talkin’ about given the site a bad name, the way you came in this morning was disgrace to the livin’ daylight,’ Keegan said to me.

‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep about it if I were you.’ My grip tightened on the handle of the shovel, its blade was silver-sharp from a summer of gravel and of sand.

‘I come in with a decent jacket and tie, and then I change. I don’t come in with work clothes on. If people see you looking like shit they’ll take you for shit. I don’t know and I don’t care what the king of the monkeys wears but we who are Irish should always be tidy when we sit down to tea,’ he quoted in support from a forgotten schoolbook.

‘You and your fucking monkeys,’ I said. I kept a tight grip on the shovel as I remembered the lightning change of the face from its ordinary foolishness to viciousness when in horseplay Galway had knocked off the hat to betray the baldness. The blade of Keegan’s shovel just missed Galway’s throat.

‘King of the fukken monkeys,’ Galway guffawed as a breast leaned out of sight above her machine, but before Keegan’s attack had time to change to Galway, Barney whistled from the scaffolding rail on the roof. The bay was ready. The mixer, in smoke and stink of diesel, roared in gear.

‘Come on: shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ Murphy shouted above the roar.

The shovels drove and threw in time into the long wooden box, tipped by handles at each end into the steel hopper when full, two boxes of gravel to the one of sand, and as the sand was tipped on the gravel Keegan came running from the stack with a cement bag on his shoulder to throw it down on top. Galway’s shovel cut the bag in two and the grey cloud of fallout drifted away as the ends were pulled free.

The hopper rose. We could rest on shovels for this minute. When it stopped Murphy took the sledge to beat the back of the hopper, and the last of the sticking sand or gravel ran into the revolving drum where the water sloshed against the blades.

As he hammered he shouted in time, ‘Our fukker who art in heaven bought his boots for nine-and-eleven,’ the back of the hopper bright as beaten silver in the sun.

As the hopper came down again he shouted in the same time, ‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ and the shovels mechanically drove and threw, two boxes of gravel to one of sand, and the grey fallout from the hundredweight of cement as the bag was cut in two, and the ends pulled free. It’d go on like this all day.

Murphy ran the mixed concrete from the drum down a shoot into a metal bucket. With a whine of the lift engine the bucket rose to Sligo, a red-faced old man with a cap worn back to front, who tipped it into a cylindrical metal container fixed to the scaffolding, and then ran the bucket down again. The barrows were filled from a trapdoor in the container, and they ran on planks to toss the concrete on the steel in the bays. The best of the roof on a hot day was that wind blew from the Thames.

In the boredom of the shovelfuls falling in time into the wooden box I go over my first day on the site a summer before.

They’d said to roll my jacket in the gutter before I went in, and when I got on the site to ask for the shout .

‘Who has the shout here?’ I asked. They pointed Barney out. He wore the same black mourning suit in wellingtons that he now leaned in against the scaffolding rail, watching the concreting on the roof, the black tie hanging loose from the collar of the dirty white shirt.

‘Any chance of a start?’ I asked.

His eyes went over me — shoulders, arms, thighs. I remembered my father’s cattle I had stood for sale in the Shambles once, walking stick along the backbone to gauge the rump, lips pulled back to read the teeth; but now I was offering to shovel for certain shillings an hour: shovel or shite, shite or burst.

‘Have you ever done any building work before?’ Barney had asked.

‘No, but I’ve worked on land.’ They’d said not to lie.

‘What kind of work?’

‘The usual — turf, oats, potatoes.’

‘You’ve just come over on the boat, then?’

‘Yesterday … and I heard you might give me the start.’

‘Start at twelve, then,’ he said in his slow way and pointed to the wooden hut that was the office. ‘They’ll give you the address of the Labour. Get back with your cards before twelve.’

There was no boredom those first days, though time was slower and there was more pain, drive to push the shovel in blistered hands with raw knee in the same time as the others, a shovel slyly jabbed against a thigh as if you’ve stumbled, and the taunt, ‘Too much wankin’ that’s what’s wrong,’ in the way fowl will peck to death a weakened hen; fear of Thursday, Barney’s tap on the shoulder. ‘You’re not strong enough for this job. You’ll have to look for something lighter for yourself. Your cards’ll be ready in the office at payout.’

No fear of the tap on the shoulder on this or any Thursday now, shut mouth and patience and the hardening of the body. My shovel drove and threw as mechanically as any of theirs by now.

‘What time is it?’ I asked Keegan. He fumbled in his pocket for the big silver watch wrapped in cloth to protect it against the dust. He read the time.

‘Another fukken twenty minutes to go,’ Galway said in the exasperation of the burden of the slow passing of the minutes, a coin for each endured minute.

‘Another fukken twenty minutes,’ I repeated, the repetitious use of fukken with every simple phrase was harsh at first but now a habit. Its omission here would cause as much unease as its use where ‘Very kind. Thank you, Mr Jones’ was demanded.

‘There’s no fukken future in this job,’ Keegan complained tiredly. ‘You get old. The work is the same, but you’re less able for it any more. In other jobs as you get old you can put the work over on others.’